


i swear by all flowers

by QueenBuzzle



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Creature Fic, Gen, M/M, Merpeople, Slash, angst? I think it might be, kind of confusing imo, no present pairing, self-obliviation, skewed perception, vague style, wow this is really different than my usual stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-26
Updated: 2014-03-26
Packaged: 2018-01-17 01:58:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1369711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenBuzzle/pseuds/QueenBuzzle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>{“You were once too afraid to forget, but I cured you of that fear. If you knew—but then, you will, in time—you would be terrified to remember. I will cure you of that, as well. The time is coming, Harry Potter. You will remember. And I...I am afraid that it might kill you.”}</p><p>In which Harry goes on a mission to find his missing memories, whether it's good for him or not, and secrets are revealed that make him wonder: is everything what it seems?</p><p>{Mer scales look like flower petals.<br/>You know, he'd heard it throughout all the time he'd known about what he was. People always made flower jokes—have you been deflowered yet, such an innocent little flower, how funny is it that your mum's name was Lily?—but Harry hadn't ever understood it until now.<br/>He wondered if they knew just what they were joking about.}</p>
            </blockquote>





	i swear by all flowers

**Author's Note:**

> This is...really different...from my usual style. I kind of like it but it's vague and confusing sometimes. 
> 
> So this was a challenge issued by Starlight_Massacre (author of Rise of the Drackens, if you haven't read it yet!) on Facebook. I was being a complainer butt and said I hadn't seen any new Creature fics lately so she challenged a bunch of us to write a Creature one-shot. I think I'm the only one who complied but ohwell :)
> 
> Note: this IS a fic about Harry being Mer.

i swear by all flowers

The dream starts out with trees.

They seemed to be very important trees, tall and regal, stoic and silent, like a thousand spindly troops awaiting order. He's in the treetops, looking over them with ill-concealed awe as the golden light filters through and seems to imbue the morning fog with its noble coloring. The birds sing their waking-up song, the wind rustles through the pine branches, and somewhere there is running water swishing over rocks. He's completely and utterly at peace in this place, wherever this achingly familiar place is, where human influence does not permeate.

Then, all at once, he swoops down like a bird and lands hard on the ground.

Only—the ground is not the ground. It is an ocean, and he is standing in the banks up to his shins, reaching for something. The foamy white waves lap against his shins but he doesn't move, not for a long time, staring out at the only things between him and the horizon: the ocean, and a lighthouse looming in the distance. As the light at the top of the building spins in his direction, he finally turns. He—or dream-he—seems disappointed, like he was waiting for something that did not come.

Behind him is neither forest nor beach. It is the sprawling wall of a hospital and a glass door labeled _EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY._ Dream-him is as wary of breaking the rules as real-him is, and so he turns to face the ocean again.

Only, once again, the scene has changed. There is no ocean. Maybe there never was an ocean, or a forest, or a lighthouse. It is only a hospital, with the nurses bustling around and the machines beeping, no longer the soft wash of the ocean loving against the sand or the wind caressing the trees. But there still appears to be only one exit, the emergency one, and so he uses it. He needs to get away.

The alarms blaring behind him do not deter his fast escape, and it seems this impossible world with its sky trees and ocean hospitals has given him another twist: emergency exits right over the edge of cliffs.

Disorientation. That is all he knows as he free-falls through the steadily-thickening air, flailing but never making a single noise. He does not know which way is up or if he is falling away or towards—he does not know his name or where he was before all of this.

Then his feet touch the ground, and it  _is_ a ground this time, solid and sturdy albeit covered in the kind of dusty debris known only to places long abandoned. He steps forward on shaky legs, the thirst for an exit to this impossible world the only thing he comprehends. This room is a contradiction, both destroyed and whole, and as his hands scrabble frantically across the floor he comes upon a child's toy.

It, like everything else in this strange room, is coated in dust and grime, long-forgotten by whatever poor soul once owned it. Quietly, he brushes off the excess dirt until the shape is recognizable. It is a stuffed deer—a stag, missing almost all of its antlers.

With a horrible jolt, he pulls in a breath. It is the first breath he can remember breathing in what feels like years, but can only have been minutes. Then he shakes his head and deposits the stag on a nearby table.

It's funny, but for a moment he thought it was  _his_ stag. The one from when he was an infant.

He squints as the dark room is suddenly illuminated—watches the dust motes swirl in the sudden light. There's a feeling in his gut, the kind of feeling you get when you know something is wrong but you don't know why.

Someone grabs his shoulder. There hasn't been a sound, but there's definitely someone holding him. He tries to yell but he can't—his voice is failing him. The someone behind him prods him with a sharp somet _hing_ , and then the something is all the way through him.

Being run through is not pleasant.

He's turned around, gently—lovingly—like this person has not just stabbed him and cares a great deal about him surviving.

He is staring at a faceless being, taller than him but skinnier if possible. It shakes its head and its voice echoes through the room as if it were coming from one hundred different sources at once.

“You were once too afraid to forget, but I cured you of that fear. If you knew—but then, you will, in time—you would be terrified to remember. I will cure you of that, as well. The time is coming, Harry Potter. You will remember. And I...I am afraid that it might kill you.”

The being turned its back on him—Harry? Was his name Harry?—and he immediately began pushing at the thing protruding from his chest. It was a sword of some sort, and it looked so  _familiar_ , but wrong, for some reason. The coloring, he decided—the coloring was wrong, too  _blue._

“Before I go, I will give you a hint. You will begin in your home, Harry Potter. Your first home. They will tell you things—liars, the lot of them. You will know who you can trust, Harry Potter. Fare thee well. And remember...Mer scales are flower petals.”

And then it was over—the dying, the voices, the impossible world.

He wakes up in his bed.

 

It's funny, but when he woke up, there was this terrible feeling inside of Harry like he'd forgotten something incredibly  _extremely_ horrendously important, but no matter how hard he tried to catch onto the forgotten memory, it just got further away.

Rolling onto his belly, Harry shoved himself up and off the four-poster bed, eying the sleeping bodies around him warily. They were all still sleeping heavily, which didn't seem possible after the awe-inspiring dream he'd just had.

Well—the awe-inspiring dream he assumed he'd just had, because he  _felt_ like he'd just had an awe-inspiring dream even if he didn't particularly remember it.

Tip-toeing to the bathroom, he made sure to give Ron's bed a wide berth. It'd been a long, hard year for their friendship, and though Harry didn't completely understand why, they weren't talking. (Again.) The only time Ron had spoken to him in the last three weeks was to accuse him of attempting to commit crimes. Harry was a bit afraid that even breathing wrong near Ron would get him a lawsuit.

Not that Ron'd win it, but still.

 

Hermione sat down next to him at breakfast, thunking her book down seriously. She leaned in, hissing to him, “I think I've been Obliviated!”

Hermione had always been a conspiracy theorist though. “Why d'you think that?” he asked, picking at his eggs a tad nauseously. Shoving it away from him, he brought several bowls of fruit closer.

It still wasn't what he wanted but it was better than those eggs!

“I've been studying Obliviation for the Charms and Defense Against the Dark Arts combined essay. The symptoms...I've been experiencing all of the symptoms!” she squeaked, shaking her head. His best friend brought up her hand for counting. Flicking up the first finger, she said, “First: confusion. Extreme at first but when Obliviation is done correctly, should fade after a time.”

Harry nodded a little and shrugged. “Yeah, but confusion could be a lot of things.”

“ _Two,_ ” Hermione snapped, index finger joining her thumb. “ Déjà vu: feeling like you've already done this before.”

“I have that all the time!” Harry protested, snorting a little bit. “The other day I was in the Restricted Section— _don't look at me like that—_ and I was looking at this book and I just felt like I had been in the same place at the same time doing exactly the same thing  _already_ .”

Hermione narrowed her eyes and Harry shrugged a little guiltily. Okay, so he'd fibbed a bit to McGonagall about which book he wanted to look at, but he was seventeen, so it wasn't technically against the rules to be in the Restricted Section!

“Three. Thinking you've done something you actually haven't done, or vice versa.”

“I turned in a paper to McGonagall and she said I'd already done it,” Harry offered sheepishly. It didn't look like it was making his friend feel any better. “Come on, you know what they say about self-diagnosing yourself. Besides, you're a bit of a hypochondriac in the best situations.”

Hermione glared. “Oh yeah? Well what about forgetting things, hm?”

Ice went through Harry's stomach. “Teenagers forget things all the time.”

“Not important things.”

“Sometimes.”

“Harry...I can't remember why Ron's not talking to us,” Hermione said urgently. “Or why my parents are in Australia, just that they are. I can't remember if I went home for Christmas last year, I can't remember the Triwizard Tournament tasks.”

Harry's eyes tracked. He didn't know why Ron wasn't talking to them, either, but he figured it was probably another jealousy thing. Hermione's parents were in Australia? Since when? He was pretty sure she stayed for Christmas last year, but the memory was suspiciously blank. And the Triwizard Tournament? Well. For a moment he'd forgotten he'd even played in it! You don't forget something like that!

Still, he wasn't going to jump to conclusions. Shrugging awkwardly, he said, “Hermione, I think you're just over-thinking things. Maybe it's some Wizarding virus that's going around.”

Hermione slammed her book shut and looked about ready to start shouting at him for his lack of intelligence or his sheep-like behavior, but he cut her off quickly.

“Anyways, do you know why everyone's making flower jokes at me?” He asked, mostly to change the subject but also because he really wanted to know.

“What do you mean?” Hermione said, shoulders deflating a little. Harry didn't relax until she began plating herself some breakfast.

“Just stupid stuff, like the other day I was in Hogsmeade and someone said 'Want to kiss me with your  _tulips_ ,' worst pun ever, and Seamus asked me if I was  _deflowered_ yet,” Harry said, rolling his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. “I just don't get it!”

Hermione squinted a little. “Everyone decided to use the same innuendos toward you? That is a bit odd actually.”

Harry shrugged again, this time helplessly. They continued their breakfast silently, heading off to class with little more talk of Obliviation or flowers.

 

It was a Hogsmeade day.

To be perfectly honest, Harry didn't usually care when it was a Hogsmeade day or not—he had ways of getting in and out of the castle without anyone knowing, but it was so much nicer not to have to sneak around.

“So we're off to Godric's Hollow?” Hermione chirped, slinging her bag across her shoulders. “I'm interested in looking at the walls in particular, to see if it's possible to rebuild.”

Harry nodded absentmindedly. “I wonder if it's been just open to the public all this time? Somehow I feel like there's something in there I was meant to find.”

Hermione glanced up at him. “I don't think it has been. I think only certain people have access. You, for one, maybe a few of your parents' friends.”

That would make him feel a lot better. Ever since his conversation with Hermione about Obliviation, he'd felt vaguely  _incensed_ and a bit indignant, like he was bumbling around in the dark with a goal but no idea how to achieve it.

It was all so frustrating.

Hermione Apparated them from Hogsmeade to Godric's Hollow and they walked the rest of the way to the house, but Harry's mind continued to linger on the loss of memories.

It was difficult, for him, to comprehend the loss of memories. Since they're gone, you don't know they were there in the first place, and you have to think of specific instances in order to remember that you were supposed to know something.

How Hermione had known she was missing so many memories was  _beyond_ Harry. 

The only thing he knew for an absolute fact was that he'd had a dream, an important one, and he couldn't remember it, but he needed to. He felt the sense of urgency in the back of his brain and a craving for something he couldn't put his finger on and it was driving him absolutely bonkers.

The Potter house was not in that great of shape. That was Harry's first thought.

His second thought was that he was having an out-of-body experience: it was like he was floating, trying to remember when he'd done this before but not being able to place the circumstance. He felt like everything was the  _same,_ down to the clothes he was wearing and the conversation he was having.

“ _Hermione,_ ” Harry gasped, a headache forming in his head. He felt like his mind was trying to punch a hole through a barrier.

“Harry?” Hermione squealed, bending down to help him up.

When had he gotten on the ground?

“Harry, did you just—faint?”

“I don't...” he shook his head. “Never mind. I just have this really bad feeling Hermione.”

She gave him a look, prodding him to explain, but he was already crossing the threshold.

Most of the Potter house was completely wrecked; debris covered the ground, dirt and grime and dust and various crunchy leaves formed a thick blanket over the floor. The only entrance seemed to be the one he'd just come through, and this room had no windows.

His heart pounded. He'd seen this room before, but he'd never been here before. The last time—well, he'd been too young to remember it, hadn't he? He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, thinking  _sharp blue metal stag flowers blood_ , and suddenly snapped his eyes open.

“Harry?”

Why was she questioning him so much? He knelt down, brushing away a pile of leaves. Yes, it had to be  _here,_ right here, that's where it was before.

“Aha.”

It was a stuffed doll, and it felt smaller now than it had before. Whenever  _before_ was. It was covered in the same gunk that was on the floor, but he vaguely recognized it—a stag, just like he'd thought. 

“Harry...”

“What, Hermione?” he demanded, half-turning. He didn't look at her really, still entrapped by the stag's filthy eyes, but he was pointed in her general direction.

“How did you know that was there?”

She sounded both horrified and like he'd just proven her point. Brows drawing together, he looked up at her and then back at the stag, shaking his head to clear it.

“I-I don't know. I just knew,” he murmured, then glanced around quickly, rubbing a spot on his sternum, which had begun to ache. “I feel like I've been here before.”

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she whispered. He shook his head again, rubbing the top of it. A migraine was forming and all he could think was  _sharp blue metal stag flower blood sharp metal blue flower blood metal sharp blood blue flower blue sharp stag._

Immediately he dropped the stag right where he'd found it, covering it back over with the leaves and shaking his head. “We can't—we can't move anything Hermione—”

It was as he turned that he saw the sword, stuck into a piece of slightly burnt oak. There was a note painted on the wall behind it, one you couldn't see from the door.

“Why—Harry!”

She followed him around to look at the wall. They both stared at it, eyes wide as saucers, for several moments. Then, Harry whispered,

“What if this isn't the first time?”

“What do you mean?”

“That we've forgotten. What if this is the trigger? You know, sometimes you forget things and then you go someplace or do something and suddenly you  _remember?_ What if this is the trigger that does that for us? We cannot move  _anything,_ just in case it happens  _again!_ ”

“But I haven't remembered anything!” Hermione protested, reaching out to touch his arm. “Do you know what that message means?”

Harry whirled on his heel and shouted. “We've remembered that we've forgotten, and isn't that the point? Now we know that we need to remember something!”

“Harry,  _do you know what that message means?_ ”

He looked back at the wall, shaking slightly. The blue sword's hilt was directly between the two sentences, which were scrawled in a muddy color.

_Come seek us where our voices sound._ and  _Flower petals._

“Someone wants me to find them,” Harry said, surely.

“How do you know it's not meant for someone else?”

“Because,” Harry stated, looking Hermione right in the eyes. “The Triwizard Tournament, Hermione.”

 

It came back slowly at first and then slammed into him like a sledgehammer, and then, thankfully, slowed down again.

The only thing that compared was when he'd been in the room for Dudley fast-forwarding a VHS once—all of the people and faces moving at five times the normal speed, only this time there was  _sound_ too, like “—above the ground—” “—t an  _owl_ !” “—Unforgivables—” “—the Goblet of Fire—” 

The people blurred into  _red freckles ferret nose teeth yellow hair scarf stinks button forehead bag eyeball_ in the most disorienting way possible and, reeling, Harry fell flat on his arse, grasping his head.

Then he was flat on his back staring up at the ceiling blankly, remembering:

_Come seek us where our voices sound,_

_we cannot speak above the ground._

There was a flash of a dragon, a golden egg, and then icy lake waters and gills, gray fins clutching at pale skin, a maze of deadly creatures, a goblet, a flash of green.

He passed out.

 

“Yeah, but what do flower petals have to do with anything? Other than, apparently, the innuendos everyone keeps making toward you,” Hermione sighed, sipping her Butterbeer. “And who would take away our memories of  _that?_ I mean, what was special about that?”

“Something about the mermaids, I guess,” Harry shrugged tiredly.

“I just don't get it,” she muttered, swirling the bottle and watching the liquid twirl inside. “I don't...get...what was so important...we needed to forget about it.”

_And the worst part is you can_ almost  _remember,_ Harry thought bemusedly, massaging his temples.  _It's just two inches out of your grasp and it's so frustrating because you can't get any higher and there's nothing to pull it closer to you._

“Well, maybe you did something bad,” suggested a voice behind Harry. Hermione peeked up and her eyes widened subtly. Harry, turning his head, scowled.

“Why're you  _eavesdropping_ on us, Malfoy?”

“Because,” the blond shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly. “You haven't figured it out yet, it's bothering me. The worst part,” he added, echoing Harry's previous statements, “is that it doesn't matter what  _I_ say. You have to figure it out yourselves. If I say anything you won't even remember it.”

“You know something.” Hermione whispered, shoulders falling slack.

Harry looked back and forth between the duo, wondering  _since when do the two of them talk civilly?_ There was a knot the size of a fist just under his ribcage, something like unease combined with longing combined with fear. If  _Malfoy_ knew, if  _Malfoy_ was bothered by it, it must be something extremely bad.

“Everyone knows,” Malfoy snorted, taking a seat like they were friends. “I hear them tell you things every day, but when you look away from them you...forget. It's called  _Ongoing Obliviation._ It's when a certain fact and everything related to it is erased from your mind continually. If I mention the fact, you probably won't even remember this conversation.”

“I know what Ongoing Obliviation is, Malfoy,” Hermione snapped, slamming her hand on the table, but Harry was sitting up straighter, staring at his long-time enemy.

“Can you  _stop_ it?” 

Malfoy shrugged his pointy little shoulders. It's funny, Harry didn't realize it until now, but they'd always been the same height and build. Today Malfoy was taller than him, two or three inches at least, and broader. When had  _that_ happened?

“Only the person who put it on you can take it off,” the prat was looking at his finger, which was tracing wood-grains on the table now.

“Who put it on us?” Hermione and Harry asked at the same time, Harry half-standing from his seat like he'd run straight to the person Malfoy said.

There was a moment of silence in which Harry wondered if Malfoy was going to lie to them, or if he simply didn't know. Then, slowly lifting his head, Harry saw the worst thing imaginable: sorrow. Sorrow and pain danced through those stormy, gray-blue eyes, and Harry's throat ached in the way that promised tears.

“You put it on yourselves.”

In the buzzing quiet that followed, Malfoy slipped away. Harry and Hermione stared at each other, looking both horrified and relieved. Their memories were gone, maybe forever, but at least it hadn't been a stranger who had done it.

They didn't talk about memories again for a long time.

 

The first punch was unexpected.

Harry was drifting slowly through the dungeons, eying the tome in his hands, headed vaguely in the direction of the kitchens. He'd been studying so much lately that the words kind of blurred together and he was reading the same lines over and over but they didn't make any sense to him, which explained why he didn't see Ron coming.

The fist hurt—but the book landing on his slipper-clad feet hurt worse.

“Oh! Ow, goddammit, what the hell is wrong with you?” Harry snarled, turning on Ron after he'd rubbed his smarting jaw and hopped about for a few seconds.

“You're  _infuriating,_ ” the redhead responded, almost in a growl. He stalked toward Harry again and Harry tried to drag his wand out of his pocket ( _goddamned sleep pants why the fuck is it so difficult—_ hey!) but Ron was too quick; the wand was seized and discarded in seconds. The taller man brought his knee up between Harry's legs,  _hard,_ and Harry saw stars.

Hunching over to protect himself, Harry tried to ignore the sudden sharp pains shooting through his body. They started at his crotch and ended in his toes and fingers, and though he was no stranger to being kneed (thank you, Dudley), it didn't hurt any less.

He almost didn't realize Ron was talking again. “...and your fucking self-preservation  _bullshit_ but here we are, you don't know  _anything_ and I look like the bloody villain because when you opened your eyes for the first time after you  _did_ it, I was angry with you, and now you can't see anything but my feckin' anger. I  _told_ you not to do it, I told you it was a bad idea, but you didn't listen to me.  _You—never—listen—to—me!”_ with each emphasized word came a swift kick to Harry's body, knocking him over onto the floor. 

“It's all your fault,” Ron whispered, wiping his hand across his mouth angrily. With one last kick, he departed, and Harry was left alone on the floor.

The book next to him was laid open flat on the floor. Harry could barely read the words from this angle but  _barely_ was enough—they finally made sense.

_“The effects of Ongoing Obliviation can be reversed only by the caster. In some cases all memories will return intact within a few months, but in cases where the Ongoing Obliviation has been in place for over a year, it's possible that the victim will never regain all of their memories. The easiest reversal method is by potion, though improperly brewed the potion may cause adverse side-effects such as vomiting, swelling of the brain, and death. After a time, however, most people realize they've been Obliviated and are able to deduce what has happened, breaking the effects of the spell._ ”

 

“No.”

The door slammed in Harry's face. As he opened his mouth to protest, Hermione shook her head and began knocking again. The door was pulled back open and the sour Potions Professor stared down at them.

“Professor, please, we just—”

“I said  _no,_ ” Snape snapped, and the door began to close again. Harry shoved it back open, glaring up at the dark man. “Potter, may I remind you you are now old enough to be tried as an adult, and assault of certified teachers is, actually, against the law?”

“I didn't touch you,” Harry shrugged, smiling innocently. “I'd just like to talk. You know. About our memories.”

Snape rolled his eyes. “Though general consensus says differently, I am not, in all actuality, dense. I knew exactly what you were here for. And I said no.”

“Why? You can just get us the recipe and we'll do it ourselves,” Hermione pleaded.

The Professor shifted, his face morphing into something like guilt. Then it went slack. “No, Granger. I am not allowed.”

“It can't be  _that_ dangerous, just three weeks ago we were brewing a potion so toxic that—”

“It's not that simple,” Snape muttered, rolling his eyes. “You see, I'm not allowed because you told me specifically not to help you in any way.”

“I just...” Hermione drew her hands through her hair. Harry looked at the floor a bit dejectedly.

To be honest he didn't expect Snape to help them. He'd never been particularly helpful, after all, just snide and degrading, and had Harry not wanted his memories back so bad, he'd never have come to the man. But to learn that  _they_ had told him not to help them (which was weird and just mind-boggling)...well. It begged to question...

...just what was so important that they'd gone to such trouble not to remember?

 

_Harry was in Godric's Hollow. He was moving, but without taking any steps; gliding over the pavement and into the house without any choice. There were no pretty tricks this time (not that he remembered a last time), and the house looked exactly like it had when he'd departed._

_There was a sense of urgency clawing at him but it was like he was looking through a camera's lens: he had no body, he couldn't move, he could only see._

_Then he rounded the corner and there was the sword. The message scrawled on the wall was different, but the letters were all scrambled and he couldn't make heads nor tails of it._

_Standing directly behind the sword was a figure in a black cloak, completely covered. Its back was facing Harry, hand running over the words idly._

_“It's funny,” the figure muttered. The words sounded wrong on his tongue, like they didn't belong to whoever was speaking them. Harry realized a little too late that that was a phrase he'd only heard himself say. “But you can't_ read  _in dreams, not really. You can look at words and they could be absolute gibberish but you'd comprehend a meaning. What does this say, Harry?”_

_The area around him made an inaudible_ snap  _and Harry found himself in his body again, in Godric's Hollow. He clenched his hands and stared at the wall._

_It looked a little something like_ Rbabit the y2ule c7777ing. _The figure was right, it was gibberish. But Harry blurted, “Seven for a secret, never to be told.”_

_Harry vaguely remembered Aunt Petunia cooing what Dudley called “the magpie poem”: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold..._

_“Mm. It's funny,” there was that phrase again, muttered with such_ familiarity.  _It almost made Harry sick. “When you were here last time you didn't seem to notice you could read.”_

_The vague flash of an Emergency Exit Only sign popped into Harry's mind, but he didn't understand what that meant. All he knew was that even his dreams knew the secret! Harry didn't need a super-secret gibberish message to tell him there was a secret, he already knew that much! Swallowing down his chagrin, Harry spat out from between gritted teeth:_

_“So what_ exactly  _does that mean?”_

_“Heh! It means that wasn't a dream. It means it was a memory.”_

_“So this is a dream.”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Great.”_

_The figure slowly turned. There was a hood up so Harry couldn't see who it was. His mind sort of jumped between this figure and the image of a similar figure stabbing him through with a blue...._

_“...wait, you're not going to stab me, are you? Because I've been having weird...thoughts...lately...and they seem to come true,” Harry said, stepping backward. Though he knew that this was a dream, perhaps his first lucid dream, he didn't particularly feel like being run through._

_The figure actually laughed. “No, that was last time.”_

_“Last time you were much more...cryptic.”_

What? Where had that come from?  _Harry thought. There was a shooting pain through his head and, though his eyes were on the figure before him, he was listening to a different conversation._

“You will know who you can trust, Harry Potter. Fare thee well. And remember...Mer scales are flower petals.”

_The figure before him seemed all too grim now. “It's happening, then. You're remembering. It might kill you, you know. You were so afraid the first time we met...afraid of forgetting everything...it was necessary, though...the things you might have been forced to do otherwise...you made the decision, Harry. You used the spell. But I was the one who cured you of your fear.”_

“You were once too afraid to forget, but I cured you of that fear. If you knew—but then, you will, in time—you would be terrified to remember.” _he'd said last time._ “I will cure you of that, too.”

 _“Why would I be afraid to remember?” Harry whispered, shakily. His palms were sweating. He felt like he knew, like he_ knew _what remembering meant but he needed an answer anyways._

_The figure tilted its hooded head. “Because remembering means taking the risk.”_

_“What risk?”_

_There was a sudden_ whooshing _noise, like wind blowing up a gale right inside the house. The pressure grew and it made Harry's head hurt._

_“Mm,” the figure murmured. “Too soon. Too soon. If you remember too quickly your brain will not be able to handle it, it will swell and you'll...well. It's time for us to part, Harry.”_

_Harry struggled against invisible ties, shouting._ “ _WHO_ ARE _YOU?_ ”

_It was only as the figure was nearly gone that he responded._

He, _for the cloak had disappeared._

 _The man exposed was_ Harry, _identical down to the very last feature...except his eyes._

_His eyes were milky white._

 

“I still don't understand,” Hermione stressed, clutching her head. Harry rubbed his own—the pressure from the dream had not diminished, he felt like he had a head cold. “A blind you told you that you didn't want to forget but you persuaded you to forget about some risk you would be taking, which made you tell Snape not to let you remember even though you keep coming to you in dreams to make you remember?”

A few students who were passing by turned to give her bemused looks, and Harry sighed. “When you put it that way, I sound crazy. But yes.”

“It doesn't make sense! What do I have to do with it?” she slammed her hands on the table. Today her hair was messier than it was yesterday.

“Maybe the risk was about both of us. Maybe I erased your memory along with my own,” Harry suggested.

“Malfoy said we did it to ourselves,” Hermione reminded him. She was only picking at her breakfast—Harry hadn't even plated himself any. He was hungry but everything was making him sick.

“Yeah, and Malfoy is chronic liar,” Harry shrugged. “I'm just saying, we can't trust him Hermione. I—I just get the feeling that his intentions aren't the best.”

It was true. This morning he'd woken up and everyone surrounding him had made him so _paranoid_. He hadn't felt at ease until he came into view of Hermione.

Hadn't blind him said something about trusting people?

Hermione nodded. Then, hesitatingly, she murmured, “I just feel like we should...broaden our horizons. There's got to be a precedent for Ongoing Obliviation, we couldn't have just decided _oh, we're gonna Obliviate ourselves!_ ”

“You check up on that, Hermione,” Harry muttered, a bit defeated. “I'm going back to bed. The...other me...he said that remembering too quickly can cause your brain to swell, and it certainly feels like that's what's happening to me. I just don't want to risk anything.”

“Harry...” Hermione murmured, voice rising slightly as he stood. “Just remember that not all dreams are real, okay?”

He glared at her, the unease rising back up in his mind. As he backed away, he snapped, “Yeah, Hermione, I get it. Nobody's gonna die because of me again.”

Sullenly, he turned and stalked out of the room.

 

It turned out Hermione didn't have to do any reading about precedents involving Ongoing Obliviation, because Harry was halfway up the Gryffindor Tower when he stumbled and began remembering.

He saw ghost-like figures of himself and Hermione whispering angrily with Ron. _“It says most of them Obliviate and bind their children because of the hunters!”_

 _“Hunters aren't a big deal anymore, just ask anyone!” Ron snarled. “And most of them Obliviate their children before anybody else knows. Everyone_ knows _Hermione!”_

 _“Yeah, but they wouldn't say anything to hunters,” Harry responded, shaking his head. “I_ have _to do this, Ron. I w-want to live, and all of the percentages show that Mer who live among humans always die.”_

He snapped out of it, tumbling backward down a few stairs, and was thrust into a new memory.

It was him, in the shower. He watched in horror as his skin turned deep black, starting at his bellybutton and inching all the way down.

His eyes focused in on the real world as he retched in repulsion, sitting on a landing twelve steps down from where he had been. Standing slowly, ignoring the twinging aches and pains in his body, he made to take another step forward. He was plunged into a third memory before he could move any further.

 _“They always equate Mer to flowers, you know,”_ Harry didn't recognize the fair blond boy before him. They were sitting by the Black Lake, watching the Squid do lazy circles in the water. _“I don't know why.”_

_“I think they think it's funny,” Harry responded, inching closer to the boy and the lake. “You didn't have to come here just for me.”_

_“I didn't. I came for me. We're both alone here Harry.”_

_“I'm not alone,” Harry protested. “Not really.”_

_“Yes, you are,” the blond boy glanced up at him shyly. “Harry, you know why you're the only one at Hogwarts, right? Why you're the only one in England? You know why they bind Mer as soon as they're born, right?”_

_Harry was inching ever closer to the water. He didn't even look at the boy. “Because of the hunters.”_

_“Yeah. Hunters have all but made us extinct.”_

_“So instead of trying to fight back we do their job for them,” Harry snorted. “Sounds like a good plan to me.”_

Harry's memory twinkled a little bit and a bit of time skipped. The sun was setting now and the duo were in the lake—only they weren't human, neither of them. The blond boy was floating out on his back, sunning himself. He looked like a human from the waist up, but at his hips a fine layer of cerulean blue scales showed up. Further down they melded his legs together into a single tail, all the way down to a translucent flipper.

The blond was a mermaid. Merman. Whatever.

And Harry—Harry was sat in shallower waters, eying the blond curiously. His bum was in the sand and his legs (or where his legs should be) floated out before him. 

Where the blond was cerulean, Harry was the deepest black. The scales looked like an oil spill: jet black shining through with a rainbow of colors, glinting in the sunlight.

Crying, Harry tugged at his hair, but he couldn't pull himself from the memory.

_“Harry! Hey, what if I told you a secret?”_

_“What kind of a secret?” Harry asked._

_The blond splashed onto his belly and swam toward him, grinning toothily like a harmless little shark. “A good secret. And you couldn't tell anybody, not ever.”_

_Memory Harry shrugged. “Only if it won't get me into trouble. Or you into trouble.”_

_The blond sat up, smiling gently. “What if I told you I'm leaving tonight?”_

_His eyes widened. “_ Leaving? _You're leaving me?”_

_The other boy nodded, a bit sadly. “Yeah, I'm leaving. I heard...well, I heard that there are others, Harry. More of us. They're hiding, but I know where to find them. We could join them, both of us, and live like we're supposed to.”_

_“In the water, you mean,” Harry added._

_“Mhm. Wanna come with me?”_

_Harry looked down at his tail, running his hands over it absentmindedly. He hummed to himself and, after a second, looked up to meet the blond's eyes. “You know, it's funny, everyone acts like they're okay with this...what I am. But when I go to shower in the Quidditch changing rooms, nobody else will come in. And when I want to swim, nobody wants to come with me. They're...they like the idea but not the actuality.”_

_The blond nodded as well. “I'm sorry. Does that mean...”_

_“Yeah,” Harry sighed. Then he grinned, suddenly happy. “We're gonna be together, with our own kind!”_

 

He woke up in the hospital wing.

He didn't move, he just kind of stared at the ceiling—the only thing he could picture was a long, scaly tale in the place of his legs. He might have been excited, if the underlying unease would disappear.

A tail.

He had a tail.

Had had. Or something. What had happened to it? Was it—had he bound himself? He'd taken plenty of showers and none of them had changed him into a mermaid, not that he knew of.

It took him a moment of ogling the ceiling tiles before he could bring himself to sit up. He stared around himself with a new light, wondering just how many people knew and how the hell a single _spell_ could stop him from remembering.

He wondered about the blond boy, too, and why he hadn't left that night. He wondered why he'd decided to Obliviate himself, and why Hermione had joined in.

He just _wondered._

 

Over the coming week Harry continued remembering. Memories came to him in dreams: _Seamus grinning and saying he always did like chasing tail, the Quidditch team staring at him in the showers, flower petals scattering in the wind._ Memories came to him while studying: _Snape sneering and assigning potions which used Mer scales, Hermione levitating the Obliviation book off the top shelf in the restricted section, flower petals floating in the water._ They came to him during class: _the blond boy dancing with him, the blond boy puffing his cheeks out in agitation, the blond boy grinning at something Harry said. The blond boy running his fingers through Harry's hair. The blond boy tucking a lily behind Harry's ear. The blond boy holding Harry's hand. The blond boy's eyes smoldering as they shared their first kiss._

And, perhaps the most harrowing of all of them: the blond boy bleeding.

Harry was brewing in the Potions lab when this memory came, and though he'd had a feeling there was a particular reason why the blond boy was no longer around, it still came as a horrible shock to him. He was only just beginning to remember his time with the boy (he estimated it had been about six months), all the feelings muddled inside of him were beginning to resurface and he'd _hoped—oh,_ he'd hoped that this boy he loved was just out in the world somewhere waiting for Harry to join him.

He felt like he'd been stabbed in the stomach when the memory came. It hurt so badly even before he was pulled in that he grabbed the table, knocking into the cauldron he was brewing over and falling onto the floor.

It came in flashes. _Laughing. Running. The two of them, holding hands and running from the castle in the distance. Not looking back. “I love you.” Being free._ Running. _Just running. And then they weren't anymore; they were Apparating through the English countryside, coming closer and closer to the ocean with each passing second. Hugging. Kissing. Snuggling together, preparing to Apparate one last time. A prickling feeling on the back of his neck. Opening his eyes to see the man six yards away. Gasping out a name, tugging on his blond boy. Not being fast enough. Feeling the arrow pierce through the blond boy and make a shallow wound on his own stomach. Letting go, watching the blond boy fall. “I love you.” Staring with horror at the man pointing the bow at_ him. _Grabbing the blond boy and Apparating back to the previous town._

Harry was numb and stiff on the floor when someone found him. He was crying softly, just letting his memories wash over him.

He barely felt himself being moved, but it would be the second time in a month he woke up in the hospital wing.

 

He was dreaming. He knew he was dreaming because it started with trees: tall, regal trees—trees that seemed so  _important._ This time there was someone next to him though, someone holding his hand.

“This is the beginning,” the blond boy murmured, laying his chin on Harry's shoulder. There was barely an inch difference in their height, so he had to hunch down to do so, but it was a nice feeling. They were together. “Trees, Harry.”

“How do you know?” Harry whispered, eying the golden light that seemed to come from nowhere. A bird swooped down from above and Harry imagined himself doing it; how it must feel to drop so far from so high, only to catch yourself.

“The Mer are careful. They can't just give out their location to  _anybody_ who asks for it, silly. They gave me clues. The first one led here...we'll find the next one eventually.”

The next clue took them to a tiny village so far from the ocean Harry thought it might kill him. They passed by a hospital here, and it was by chance that Harry remembered it. Later, the blond boy would spend his last moments there. Breathing shallowly, he'd sob, “I love you. My Harry. I love you. You  _have_ to keep going. Please find them for me, Harry. W-we didn't...we didn't even make it to the ocean.”

And then he'd close his eyes, and he wouldn't open them again.

Harry tried to keep going. After the village there was another forest, and then a strip of beach near an inland river (where the hunter caught up with them). He backtracked to the village to try to help the blond boy, but it was a muggle village. After the village he skipped straight to the river, but it took him six days to find the next clue and by then he just wanted to die himself. This clue started with “This is the end,” and he couldn't make himself finish it without the blond boy.

So he turned around. He went back to the forest, and then the village (and pointedly ignored the hospital), and then the first forest with the trees the blond boy had loved so much. And then he went home.

It took McGonagall and Snape, co-Headmasters, three hours to get him to tell them where he'd been. When he broke, he  _broke,_ and it took both of them and Pomfrey to hold him down long enough to sedate him. 

When he was released from the Hospital Wing he took Hermione's advice and they Obliviated themselves. Ron refused to go through with it, but didn't stop them.

It was the end of a long friendship. It was the end of a lot of things, though.

 

“Mr. Potter? Are you with us still?”

Harry groaned and rolled over, onto his stomach. He felt a bit nauseated and like someone was continuously wrapping on his skull.

“I'll take that as a yes. How are you feeling?”

He groaned again and blinked his eyes open. Pomfrey was staring at him. Behind her, he could see McGonagall and Snape.

“Yes, that tends to happen when one Obliviates himself. Miss Granger is herself beginning to feel the effects.”

Harry sat up, weakly. His heart was in his throat, and almost without realizing it, he began crying. They were hot, wet tears, inching slowly down his cheeks in the way that they tend to do when you know you can't change what's happening.

“Oh, dear. What's wrong?” Pomfrey gasped, bending to his level. He wiped angrily at his eyes and trembled, holding his stomach.

“What was his name?” he pleaded, looking beyond Pomfrey to McGonagall and Snape. McGonagall looked a little confused, but Snape was pale and resigned-looking.

“He was called Jonah,” the sour man murmured.

Harry pulled his knees up to his chest, screaming out the the injustice of it all. He shook and stood, ripping at his robes until he could see his bare stomach.

He'd always wondered where that little white scar had come from.

Rubbing it, he whimpered, “Jonah.”

Harry didn't see the looks McGonagall and Snape shared. He didn't need to. He turned and marched from the Hospital Wing.

“Mr. Potter! Come back!” Pomfrey shouted, running after him.

“ _I'm fine!_ What else could possibly happen? I've remembered  _every. Last. Single. Detail._ Leave me alone!” he yelled, ignoring the looks he was garnering from the other students.

He didn't need this.

 

Maybe it was fate that had him, running from Pomfrey, hiding in the Prefect's bath. Maybe it was coincidence.

(He'd never believed in coincidence.)

He was angry, but he wasn't mad. He sad sad-angry, ripping his clothing from him and turning the water to the tub on, yelling simply to hear his voice echo in the ceramic-covered room. He wanted to change things. He wanted Jonah to still be alive and he wanted them to be with the other Mer. 

He wanted his  _tail,_ he wanted it like he'd never wanted anything else in his life. 

Harry knew it wouldn't be that easy, but when the water hit his bare legs and they didn't immediately begin turning, he collapsed into the water and just cried.

 

Hermione didn't talk to him when she sat next to him in the library. She just looked at him, not saying a word, taking in the title of his book.

_Binding: Spells, Charms, Rituals, Potions, And More._

With his memory intact, he knew that he'd used a specific Binding spell. He knew there was a counter-spell. And now he had found it.

 

“And you're sure you want to do this,” Hermione murmured. She was still wearing her cap from graduation, even though the ceremony had been over for hours now. Families were still milling around the grounds, students ready to go home for the last time.

“Yes,” Harry nodded. He was pale and he felt like he hadn't slept in a year. Every night Jonah's face, smiling with his sharp little friendly-shark teeth, plagued his dreams. In the past two months since his memories had returned, since he'd unbound himself, he'd read everything there was to read about Mer. Not that that was much.

But he knew Mermen could get pregnant, and he knew that the two of them could have had a family one day. They could have disappeared into the depths of the ocean with their little Merchild, where hunters couldn't harm them.

Even that was taken from him. Everything was, in the end.

“I'll miss you. Will you visit?” Hermione whispered, eyes dropping to their feet. They both knew she couldn't visit him, not where he was going. He wouldn't be allowed to tell her the location.

“Probably,” he responded.

They both heard the unspoken  _not._

Hermione cried out and finally took off her cap. It was adorn with the special tassel that both Head Students got at the end of the year and she was so  _proud_ of herself. But she tossed it on the ground and hugged him hard.

“I wish I would have known him,” she whispered.

Even with the potion they brewed after the fact, Hermione didn't regain all of her memories. She had known Jonah, Harry had memories of the three of them together, but she would never remember them.

“He was great,” Harry promised. “He was worth it.”

“Worth what?” she asked as he pulled away, turning his back to her.

They were standing outside the Hogwarts wards. Harry smiled half-heartedly and shrugged.

“Worth the pain, Hermione.”

He Disapparated then. It would be a long time before she saw him again, and by then he was a changed man.

 

.

.

.

Mer scales look like flower petals.

You know, he'd heard it throughout all the time he'd known about what he was. People always made flower jokes— _have you been deflowered yet, such an innocent little flower, how funny is it that your mum's name was Lily?—_ but Harry hadn't ever understood it until now.

He wondered if they knew just what they were joking about. Sure, they acted all tough and seductive and thought they were making lovely little innuendos, but did they actually  _know_ why Mer were so often compared to flowers? He didn't think so because even  _he_ hadn't known.

Excitement drained out of him like blood from a bullet wound. He was left with whiplash so extreme he stumbled, grasping out at the tree next to him and holding on for dear life.

The tide rolled in with the fog: heavy, white-gray foam and even whiter fog competing to grab his attention. It was a moot point really, he was so utterly  _decimated,_ so entirely unfeeling that you could shake him by the shoulders and all he'd do is stare right past. 

It'd been a long night.

It's funny, the ocean usually made him feel  _better,_ but this morning it was mocking him, lapping at the bodies of his fallen family. 

The Mer were strewn all around, covered in congealed blood, naked. He knew from his books that, when a Mer dies, their tail forms. After their body has cooled, the scales fall off, leaving behind their human legs.

Mer scales look like flower petals, and this murder scene looked like so many wilting flowers. So beautiful, so painful, so  _delicate._

 

_They were back in Godric's Hollow. It was always Godric's Hollow._

_Harry trembled a little as he pushed open the door. The house was relatively untouched from the last time. There was no message on the wall, but the sword was still stuck through where it was last time. The other him was stroking the grimy stag silently._

_Harry shut the door behind him, and though it was nighttime and there were no lights, the room didn't darken. The other him glanced up, which seemed to be irrelevant really, as his eyes were milky white._

_“Still alive, then.”_

_Harry nodded. He remembered their previous conversation, and blurted; “I know the risk now.”_

_The other him nodded too. “It's funny how remembering is neither good nor bad.”_

_“You prepared me for it to be terrible.”_

_“Wasn't it?”_

_Harry blinked. “You're contradicting yourself.”_

_The other him shrugged. “You mean_ you're  _contradicting_ my _self. Haven't you figured it out yet?”_

_“What? There's more secrets?” Harry laughed._

_“Just this one.”_

_“Tell me.”_

_“I'm only a part of you, Harry. I'm not a separate entity. You...you could say I'm your subconsciousness. Or your conscience. I'm not_ real,  _I'm not some greater being sent to intervene. You_ wanted  _to remember. I only reflect your own thoughts.”_

_Harry rubbed his forehead. “So why are you blind?”_

_The other him snorted. “Wow, insensitive. I'm the part of you who didn't want to see, Harry. The part of you who decided to forget. It's a metaphor.”_

_“The Emergency Exit sign was in the hospital,” Harry said instead of answering. He felt a little numb about it. The other him nodded sadly. “I think I understand now. Why you're here. I think without you I would have died, remembering. You were here to ease me through it. I'm glad I remembered. I'm glad I know about him.”_

_The other him glanced up at Harry, closing his eyes. When he opened them, they were healed. Harry stepped backward, wondering what that meant. Shaking his head, he continued._

_“But everyone is gone. I remembered for nothing. I reached the end and I'm all alone again.”_

_The other him laughed, looking toward the ceiling. It was lightening, like the sun was rising. “Open your eyes, Harry. I did. I can see now!”_

Something jerked on his leg. He looked down to see an arm, reaching out of the floor. The dream went fuzzy and then came back into focus. Harry opened his mouth to say something but the arm tugged on him again, pulling him from sleep.

There was shrieking. “This one lives! This one lives!”

The sun was bright in his eyes—he'd fallen asleep on the beach. Maybe he'd fainted. The waves were lapping at his feet, but the water didn't come up far enough to transform his legs.

The beach was cleaned up. The bodies were stacked on a raft ready to be pushed to sea. People were collecting the flower petals—the scales—quietly, but at the shrieking of the woman hovering over Harry, they began turning.

“You're alive,” he whispered, throat burning. Tears burbled up and over his cheeks. Someone pulled him into a sitting position. “I can't believe you're alive!”

“We thought you were gone with the rest of them! We were going to send you to the funeral pyre!” the (naked, he now realized) woman gasped, clutching him to her chest. “You are Jonah, yes? It has taken many months for you to get here!”

Harry laughed a little sadly, throwing his arms around her. “N-no! Jonah, Jonah died. He was...he was my boyfriend. We were making our way here several months ago and a hunter caught up to us by the river. He died. I went back home. Recently I...decided...to finish his journey. My name is Harry.”

He was surrounded by Mer now. There were arms around him and tears and people praising Jonah, welcoming Harry, apologizing, and celebrating.

 

Harry understood now.

He understood why Jonah had said they were alone. Harry didn't want to believe that, he never did, because he had Jonah. And before Jonah, he had himself.

But now, surrounded by the Mer who were left—and there were not many, admittedly—he felt like he was a part of something for the very first time.

And he swore to himself, in that moment, that things would change. He swore for all the flower petals strewn across the beach that no hunter would hurt his people again.

 


End file.
